A Proposal in the Falling Snow
Once my business was concluded, I chose not to return the way I had come through spatial travel.
It wasn't as if I lacked the money, after all. I returned the carriage I'd borrowed for a time from the Second Prince, purchased two horses and a carriage of my own, and set out on the road back, driving it myself.
I had already done everything within my power to desperately till the ground — all that remained was to wait for the soil I had hastily prepared to ripen. And so, in order to savor this brief stretch of peace, I planned to build a few small memories with Lapis along the way.
If one wanted to call it a belated honeymoon, then a honeymoon it was.
Fortunately, Lapis didn't seem to mind either. Having finished her disguise in fresh clothes, she clung snugly to my side as we traveled on, a look of quiet contentment on her face.
"It almost feels like... we're a merchant couple making the rounds of the countryside."
Riding beside me as I held the reins and drove the horses, Lapis kept me kindly company. I, for my part, could neither lend my voice's power to the conversation nor write out a reply on paper — my hands were occupied with the reins — yet she spoke on regardless, pouring out her feelings so that this moment might not pass in dull silence.
By the time dusk had begun to settle, I unhitched the horses by a nearby river to let them rest, then sat down beside Lapis.
The air was bitterly cold. My body was hardly so frail as to complain about this much chill, but she was an ordinary human being, and I knew better than to assume she felt the cold as I did — so I pulled off my outer coat and draped it over her shoulders.
"Rohen."
"Why?"
"...When the Demonic Tree revives, I want to go to the battlefield too."
Leaning against my shoulder as she gazed out at the fading sunset, Lapis confided her heart in a quiet voice.
"If that's what you want, then that's fine."
"Really?"
Whether in places I could see, or places I couldn't, I knew full well how desperately she had been striving. I was hardly so dense a fool that such efforts would escape my notice — how could they possibly?
"Being forced to wait alone in some safe place, doing nothing but pray that the one you love returns unharmed... that is, in truth, a cruel thing. To have ability of your own and yet be able to offer no help at all, only to hear the news that the one you love has fallen — it would grant a grief beyond measure. And for some reason, I can't shake the feeling that if I were to die, no matter how the war ends, you would follow me without a moment's hesitation."
"Don't speak of dying as if it were a possibility."
When Lapis scolded me with a faintly irritated expression, I gave a soft laugh and wrote out my apology in reply. I didn't dislike that nagging of hers — but across the beautiful sunset spreading before our eyes, a silhouette was faintly making its presence known, grown large enough to be unmistakable. The Demonic Tree.
Honestly, I had already prepared some means of learning how the Demon King's death might be brought about. What remained was the question of how he would attempt to tempt humanity — and seeing through that scheme would be its own problem.
If this vicious cycle of resurrection truly was, as the First Emperor said, a trial of human desire, then the monsters and demonkin that would appear anew in the wake of the Demonic Tree's revival would inevitably offer far superior magic stones — or things worth even more than magic stones. And so the Demon King, even if it meant his own defeat, would surely seek to inflict catastrophic, near-irreparable damage upon humanity.
Indeed, back in the days of the First Emperor, every nation had been on the brink of collapse from the aftermath of war, and humanity had escaped that stage only by becoming dependent on artifacts powered by magic stones. The price of that dependence had been, in the end, the Demonic Tree's survival.
Extrapolating from that, the Demon King will likely try to drag the war out for as long as possible.
The longer it stretched on, the more one-sidedly it would be humanity that withered and bled.
Either way, the eradication of the Demonic Tree is my foundation. For now, I should think only of victory, and leave the aftermath for later.
Perhaps because she noticed how deep my thoughts had sunk, Lapis fell silent and quietly rested her hand atop mine. Seeing that, I rose to my feet.
"Let's go. There's not much farther to the nearest territory, and the sun will be fully down soon."
"Yes."
"Since we're traveling under hidden identities anyway, it might be better to stay at a decent inn for the night. The soundproofing may not be very good, though."
Reading the roundabout message in my writing — that I wanted to spend the night together — Lapis flushed scarlet, snatched the paper from my hand, crumpled it up hurriedly, and hid it away.
And so, cherishing the relatively leisurely time we'd been granted like something precious, Lapis and I returned to the duchy, wandering the roads just as the merchant couple we were disguised as.
Three months later... winter came that year.
"Is there anything else I can help with?"
Aria, who had been racking her brain over the final review of the thesis she was soon to submit, swept back her disheveled platinum hair. The greasy sensation clinging to her fingertips frayed her nerves — though washing it off would only return it to this state soon enough anyway.
"Senior... I take it you don't do any research of your own?"
Like the Academy, the Magic Tower did not recognize external rank within its walls. But unlike the Academy, where that principle was honored only on the surface, the Tower's discipline actually carried real weight. Because only then did the seat of Tower Master hold any true meaning.
"People who try to polish off a full year's worth of magical research in one go, like you, are actually rare... Most of us spend the majority of our time cooped up in these stuffy dens, so if we don't rest in our spare hours, we'd genuinely go mad."
Slowly — the way she had done for some time now — Aria looked back at the man who had shown her such singular kindness, and took a sip of warm water.
"Some rest, they call it. As if anything here counts as rest..."
People lusted after her for her looks, and even knowing she was the daughter of the former Empress who had joined the rebellion, they approached her hoping to profit from her rank as imperial princess. She never showed it, but Aria had always been exquisitely sensitive to the eyes around her, and she had no difficulty reading what intentions lay beneath the favors they offered. She had drawn her lines rigidly and kept her distance from everyone — yet with the man before her, she had grown relatively close.
Just as you said... living here, I've come to see that there really are people who love me purely, with nothing asked in return.
It was a feeling she could never repay, but the truth of it was not without its quiet joy. The way his face quietly reddened at the sight of her faint smile — it held a charm altogether different from Rohen's.
How long has he liked me, I wonder?
At first, he'd simply been the senior who helped a junior who didn't know her way around the Tower. After that, the senior she'd raised her voice against in heated arguments over the topic of her thesis. Nearly a year had passed since she first came to the Magic Tower, and those memories, each in their own way, had undeniably planted the seed of fondness for the man before her.
But that was, in the end, nothing more than the feeling of a junior who respected and looked up to a good senior.
"Senior, do you like me?"
"M-me? Someone like me, liking a princess like you? Not a chance..."
"You are astonishingly bad at acting."
Stretching, Aria drew back the curtains for the first time in ages. Beneath the light filtering through, the landscape of approaching winter came into view.
She had known all along that he harbored feelings for her, and until now she had deliberately turned a blind eye. But this winter — knowing what promise Rohen had made to her — Aria resolved that she could no longer look away. The man before her deserved the time to settle his own heart.
"Thank you."
"Huh? Out of nowhere?"
"You've heard plenty of rumors about me. Some of them are even true, in part."
"That most of them are lies — that much isn't hard to figure out. Th-the you I've seen here was... far removed from most of those rumors."
Stumbling over his words now and then, yet still conveying his honest heart — eyes that looked at her, straight and unflinching, exactly as she was. It was, Aria thought, remarkably like Rohen.
If she hadn't loved Rohen. If she hadn't wanted her half-brother as a man. Perhaps she might have come to feel something more than simple fondness for this senior — for this man.
"Senior. I'm sorry, but there's someone I love."
"...What a familiar line. That's what nearly every woman says when she turns me down."
Scratching the back of his head, the man let out a sigh and smiled a smile laced with self-mockery.
"Women who already belong to someone are always more attractive, aren't they? Otherwise they'd have no one at their side at all. Maybe that's exactly why you fell for women like that, Senior."
"Don't be cruel... it stings enough being rejected before I've even confessed."
He had briefly wondered whether Aria was making it all up — but he had, on rare occasions, glimpsed her wearing a happy smile he had never once seen from her before, and so he clenched his fist with the expression of a man who had accepted the truth.
"...What kind of man is he?"
"Who knows?"
The weather was quite bitter, so Aria wrapped her arms around herself as she answered.
"Someone who was there, in the moment I needed him most — even before I ever said I needed him?"
"When you put it like that... there's not a single move left for me to make."
"Don't sell yourself short."
Chuckling softly, Aria rose and walked over slowly, straightening the rumpled collar of her senior's clothes.
"In my eyes, at least, you're a genuinely fine man. Before long, you'll meet a woman far better than me."
With that, she gave his back a gentle push and sent him out of the room.
Then, alone in the emptied laboratory, Aria gathered up the scattered magical theses, leaned against the window, and let a wistful look settle into her eyes.
"I want to go home soon."
The memory of Rohen saying to her, There's something I really want to tell you, set her heart racing. She knew what words he meant to say — but knowing and experiencing them firsthand were two very different things.
Spurring herself onward like that, Aria completed and submitted every last thesis at the end of a grueling twenty-seven days, and finally set out on the road home.
Since the Magic Tower belonged to the Altair Dukedom's territory anyway, the return journey took barely a week. But the weather had grown colder still in the meantime — each breath she exhaled leaked out in a plume of white. And when she finally arrived, fresh white snow was drifting down in earnest.
"We've arrived."
The carriage came to a halt in the courtyard at the back of the mansion, and as the driver opened the door, Aria pulled her coat tight and stepped down carefully.
No — before she could even manage that.
The moment the door swung open, Rohen — a light dusting of snow gathered on his hair — was there, smiling, one large hand extended toward her. Aria found herself smiling before she knew it, took his hand, and descended from the carriage under his escort.
"Welcome back."
"I'm home."
Clatter!
Whether there was maintenance to be done, or whether he'd simply caught on quickly that he wasn't meant to be there, the driver turned the horses toward the stables and disappeared.
Step. Step.
In a world of falling white snow, only the two of them remained.
"I've been looking forward to this."
Warming her chilled hands with a soft breath, Aria spoke.
"You said there was something you absolutely had to tell me?"
Rohen had shaken his head helplessly when she'd suggested that saying it like that would make for a terribly unromantic proposal — and then, slowly, he knelt.
At the same moment, he drew it from his breast and slipped it onto the ring finger of her left hand: an antique ring set with a ruby — her birthstone, matched to the month of her birth.
"You've... been waiting a long time, haven't you?"
The snow was beginning to fall more heavily now. But the hand that held hers was so rich with warmth that Aria felt no cold at all.
"Next spring — won't you stay at my side, always, as my wife?"
She had expected the moment, to some degree. She had expected the words, to some degree.
And yet — as if she wished to remember this instant forever. For a single breath, time seemed to stop altogether, and her heart in the present and the voice she had just heard went on echoing and echoing. Was it only her imagination?
"It's cold. Let's get inside."
Touching her faintly flushed cheeks, tracing the ring now set on her left hand, Aria walked ahead across the snowfield in small, quick steps, leaving a trail of dainty footprints behind her. Rohen, watching her go and about to protest that she still hadn't answered him — when Aria glanced back over her shoulder.
Looking back on everything, there had truly been so much. All the twists and turns it had taken for their relationship to grow into what it was now — it felt almost miraculous.
And so...
"Husband!"
Handling her ring as if it were something infinitely precious, shyly touching it, Aria went on with a happy smile.
"We finally made it here, didn't we?"
Husband. She had called him that — so why did the word stir such a strange feeling in him? Perhaps it was the half-shared blood between them raising its voice in protest.
But now even that seemed to mean nothing. Drowning in the joy that washed over every emotion he had, Rohen answered with a faint smile.
"Yeah. We really did."
And there on the snow-covered road, the footprints of the two of them mingled — side by side, perfectly intertwined.